Man wins €1m Picasso painting in €100 charity raffle

A man has won an original Pablo Picasso painting worth more than €1m (£870,000; $1.2m) in a charity raffle.

Ari Hodara, an engineer and art enthusiast, learned he was the winner on Tuesday when he answered a video call from Christie's auction house in Paris.

"How do I know this isn't a prank?" the 58-year-old asked when he was told he was the new owner of the 1941 work by the Spanish master.

Organisers said more than 120,000 tickets for the prize draw were sold at €100 (£87; $118) each, raising around €11m (£10m; $13m) for Alzheimer's research.

The draw was the third edition of the "1 Picasso for 100 euros" fundraising raffle, which was founded in 2013.

This year's prize was Tête de Femme (Head of a Woman), a gouache-on-paper portrait rendered in Picasso's signature style. It depicts his partner and muse, the French surrealist artist Dora Maar.

"I was surprised, that's it," said Hodara during a phone call with auctioneers after the draw. "When you bet on this, you don't expect to win... But I'm very happy because I'm very interested in painting, and it's great news for me."

Hodara's ticket was number 94,715. He said he bought it over the weekend after learning about the competition by chance.

French journalist Peri Cochin organised the raffle with backing from Picasso's family and foundation.

She said it was a "great thing" that the winner lived in Paris, despite tickets being sold in dozens of countries worldwide.

"It's going to be very easy for us to deliver the painting, so we're happy," she said.

The city is also where Picasso himself lived and worked for much of his life, and thousands of the artist's paintings, prints and sculptures are on display in its museums.

Of the money raised, €1m is set to go to the Opera Gallery, the painting's owner, with the remaining funds donated to France's Alzheimer's Research Foundation.

"This Picasso initiative is one more building block so that one day Alzheimer's will be nothing more than a bad memory," the foundation's head Olivier de Ladoucette said, the AFP news agency reported.

The first edition of the raffle was won by a 25-year-old American from Pennsylvania in 2013, with funds raised to help preserve the Lebanese city of Tyre - a Unesco World Heritage Site.

A 58-year-old Italian accountant won the second edition, in 2020, after her son bought her a ticket for Christmas. Proceeds were donated to sanitation projects in schools and villages in Cameroon, Madagascar and Morocco.